Somewhere between a third and half of Americans read at or below a sixth grade level so these books are at the reading level of the median American.
yeah, I remember going to the bookstore dressed as Luna loveshit for the midnight release party of the final book and meeting people with more elaborate costumes who clearly didn't read the previous book.
Americans should have instead been reading YA romance novels and harems like I did as a child. I turned out fine
Harry Potter is the epitome of liberal politics. Throughout the series you learn how fucked up the wizard world is, magic hitler starts to rise to power because of it, and in the end they beat hitler and Harry becomes a cop. But nothing changes. House elves are still enslaved, and magic races are continued to be discriminated against.
Hitler beats himself, he literally gets killed by not correctly interpreting RULES.
This is basically the main rule for every western fiction, even in fantasy and sci-fi where you would expect authors have the most leeway to ride on their wild imagination. Problem is, they don't have wild imagination or even the one required of imagining something other than capitalism (even their visions of previous systems like feudalism or slavery is still basically capitalism with historical costumes).
Its a little more free in literature, and since 2020 some good(ish) stuff is getting made.
'Lovecraft country' (one absolutely fire season, tied up and concluded) if Malcolm x was a riff on 20th century fiction, primarily the Lovecraft mythos. Not if he did one; if he was one. It says and does more in its first episode than most shows do in a decade of long seasons. Has a beautiful sex scene that's ambiguously gay or trans and so gory it might not make it onto a theater screen, and thats not even the most interesting thing going on in that scene.
'Andor' (final planned season in production) is a prequel to the one good star wars movie. Its extremely lefty, extremely well made at every level, and tense with zero sword wizards.
'Severance' (second season delayed by strikes, in production) is an ontological mystery that explores cognitive dissonance corpo infantilization and the exploitation of labor, how it interacts with self, the theft of time, relationships, self-knowledge, all kinds of shit. Funny, surreal, dramatic when it needs to be, excellent visual direction.
'Andor' is a prequel to the one good star wars movie
that movie is so good, almost everything else Disney made feels like an 8-year-old's first fan fiction.
I kind of empathize because Animorphs, Star Trek, Simpsons and Beast Wars permanently imprinted on my brain in a similar way. The difference is that I know to compartmentalize my child-brain and not trivialize adult issues by publicly saying things like Steve Miller is the Skorponok to Trump’s Megatron, regardless of how true that statement is.
Animorph voter guide:
Rachel: Trump
Cassie: Jill Stein
Marco: No vote
Jake: Kamala
Ax: RFK
This is Rachel slander. Rachel is actually firebombing a Walmart.
Jake is both Trump and RFK. A bullet grazed his head leading to him getting a worm in his brain. Marco is Anthony Scaramucci.
I feel the urge to disagree with you because I expected issues that concern adults in power to be morally gray and complicated but these people are cartoonishly evil. So is it even less correct to compare them to Swiper the Fox or the Hamburgler?
Steve Miller is the Skorponok to Trump’s Megatron
I can't wait for him to unceremoniously fall into a lava pit.
edit: wow, how is that guy 39?
Miller falling into proverbial lava and a more aggressive, delusional lickspittle like Inferno replacing him actually sounds more likely than him just keeping his job for four years.
Alternatively, he's waspinator and he never fucking goes away, he just continually becomes a third tier right hand man to those in power but is so ineffective at any job he's given he probably should have been killed off immediately, if he wasn't just a walking punchline and scapegoat for those in power.
Waspinator was funny and refused to massacre innocent Neanderthals, though.
I don't remember much about Animorphs, but I do remember reading it. I can recall brainworms being the enemy, and there was one guy who got stuck as a bird because he remained in that form for too long. I also remember a girl turned into a fly and was getting pretty close to that limit, too.
Oh, also sexy blue centaur people
Getting chopped in half as a starfish and both halves turn back into a copy of you
Did that happen? That's be pretty fucking hardcore for a children's book.
I don't remember if that happened exactly but animorphs was pretty fucking dark, not just for a children's book series. They regularly get injuries which would absolutely be fatal if not for the morphing. The bulk of their enemies are their own mind controlled friends and family, and we do get scenes where we see said mind controlled people screaming and begging for death in cages between mind control sessions.
Animorphs is pretty great. We've got animal facts, we've got body horror, we've got brutal fights and teenage guerillas with PTSD. We've got moral dilemmas, well realized alien biology and sociology, fantastic characters and world changing stakes.
Oh, and also K. A. Applegate supports her trans daughter.
Same but without animorphs. I gotta get my bins of childhood beastwarstoys from my folks to photograph and brag post. It's like a solid 40 or so and I kept the box cards for em too
I'm so fucking jealous. My parents sold all my cool shit when I was visiting family for a summer, then had to gall to ask me where it all was when they found out some of it was worth money.
Black Lives Matter! (Except in the one book series I have read and based my ideology on which has one black person in 7 novels)
Black Lives Matter! (Lavender Brown is black in the first movie, then she gets recasted in later movies as a white lady when she gets speaking roles.)
If she was, then Harry and Ron laughed at a black person for opposing slavery.
It's either some of the bible, or Harry Potter, which is treated as the bible.
Umm actually real lib theory hours is that:
trump = ulfric
empire = dems
thalmor = ruZZZia
who's the dragonborn?
wait trump is on the skyrim side, ulfric is on the irl side???? SKYRIIM CONFIRMED???
Hasan piker (he rigged all the votes cuz he listened to that one trump song)
Shits so fucked, any comparison to fiction feels out of touch
I spent so long trying to get chatgpt to write "harry potter and the philosphers stone" in MSE and it kept just slapping in umlauts and ø. Unrelated but it deleted my question when I asked it if it was not allowed to critique the us
JKR never actually said Hermione wasn't black
I really hope not but so far it's been pretty prescient
